The House of Fashion

This morning I read about the retailers, J Crew a more mainstream source of clothing for the aspiring prepster and Neiman Marcus for the aspiring and/or wealthy customer whose Christmas catalogs are something to see as they include specialized vehicles, trips next to high fashion and chic bags.  Neiman’s redefined luxury retail.  And their death is for now delayed as they file for Chapter 11 they owe much of their demise to of course the Vulture Capitalists who used debt to finance their own incomes and line their Brioni Suit pockets with outrages fees and interest the stores were forced to pay versus make investment in the actual retail outlets and build their e-commerce platform as they should to compete with the flowing river that is composed of cash, Amazon.  But even the allure of high fashion is now something Bezos wishes to come aboard that port as well as he moves in a new circle of high fashion friends.  Go figure we all like to look good, well unless your at home during a pandemic then the once chic athleisure wear is now replaced with pandemic chic sleep/loungewear.

I remember my first time going to Neiman’s in Texas where they began and the awe of wonder and beauty that this store defined. I grew up in retail as my Mother began at a small company that was once called Nordstrom Best and it too evolved and may also find itself on the same train that Barney’s, Sears, Penny’s, Lord and Taylor, Henri Bendel,  and Macy’s have already boarded and some have since departed to be distant memories on the trip to the retail dead zone.  There are a lot of retailers that I have memories of that were consolidated into other brands and some that just simply shut their doors to be vacant fronts of once thriving industry that ran from the high to the low everything in between.  They sold shoes, drugs, hardware, books and toys and all of that we can now buy on Amazon. Wow that is distressing if not again wrong on so many levels.   There is a Wiki page dedicated to the corpses of this industry and many I recall growing up with, going to, shopping or even working at and learning a trade and building my skills that eventually led me to being a Teacher.  I can tell you if you can sell shoes to women and men you can certainly learn to peddle knowledge to kids, the joke was I made more money doing that than I did as a Teacher.

Retail was unionized when I worked in that business and in turn Nordstrom was the first to offer profit and share which we have since seen as stock options in the tech sector creating the billionaire class that largely think they know everything about everything and then they don’t.  I recall the dot com collapse, the 2008 one and now Pandemia which has exposed how fraught they truly are as they run on the fuel of bullshit and the backs of others in a way that retail did.  Using women, lowly educated and/or poorly trained people to sell, pimp or push a product that is marked up beyond value to give it a label of import, ironically made by lowly paid, often “slave” labor.  And that is a cycle that is glorified, glamourized and showcased in magazines, movies and tv.  Well it was as even that industry of  fashion has taken its hits to its bow and that ship is sinking as well.  But Captain Bezos is now hitting that port as well.  Well he did capsize the Project Runway monopoly with his ironically titled, In the Cut even taking its hosts with him; Don’t Pirates always take some booty? But it was less about reality as that show was facing a crisis of its own, over their former Captain, Harvey Weinstein, who also was very involved with all the details of his business, even marrying a designer who in some odd perverse fashion of  dressed his victims, whoops I mean stars.  But, fashion  is always about stars and led by Anna Wintour she made sure who was in and who was not.  But even she too may be on a sinking ship.  Vogue may exist but in less glossy pages and fewer issues that women will use to idolize and demonize themselves over not having the latest, the it bag and the shoes that someone died for.  Literally.

And the rich will profit off the death of those victims of Covid. I have written often about the hypocrisy of Gates and his ilk and this is no different.  Zuckerberg is killing it to use a pun on Facebook as is Bezos and that Buffet is shedding stocks like a virus is another who while promising to give he used the pandemic to fire all the workers at his business, Cort Furniture, and hire temporary workers stopping an attempt to unionize the shops.  How convenient.  Some things just work out.  And for now there are attempts to be ethical and step up to protect workers,  but I don’t expect it to last as that affects the bottom line. Think of it like a disease, the Midas Touch in reverse, they kill everything they touch.

Billionaires are playing savior now. But they broke the economy to begin with.
Let’s not get too excited about rich people’s philanthropy during coronavirus.

By Tara Isabella Burton|The Washington Post|May 15, 2020
         Tara Isabella Burton is a Religion News Service columnist. She is the author of “Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World” 

As the coronavirus pandemic rages across the United States, the nation’s titans of industry have begun to style themselves as heroes by pledging millions of dollars to health care. Twitter and Square chief executive Jack Dorsey offered $1 billion — just under a third of his wealth — to fight the virus. Oprah Winfrey has donated $10 million. Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt have teamed up to fund the Pandemic Action Network, which seeks to influence world governments to increase their own spending on global health initiatives such as the World Health Organization.

It is tempting to laud these figures as self-made men and women paying back the spoils of their success to the rest of us. But the United States relies on, and worships, individual billionaires and their charitable efforts precisely because the country is so broken. The cultural and economic systems that made these people successful exist at the expense of the collective good. The quintessential American myth of the clever bootstrapper lionizes someone who triumphs despite the derelictions of government, infrastructure and health care that have made this pandemic so dire. Our very conception of success — resting on veneration of inimitable heroic individuals — has worsened the country’s failures.

Americans have, historically, been eager to view themselves as a nation of individuals, rather than a collective. Our early philosophers — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau — preached a gospel of self-reliance. “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist,” Emerson wrote in 1841. Nineteenth-century visitors to the country, such as the French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville, were struck by both American optimism and American obsession with individual liberties. “Americans believe their freedom to be the best instrument and surest safeguard of their welfare,” Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “. . . to secure for themselves a government which will allow them to acquire the things they covet and which will not debar them from the peaceful enjoyment of those possessions.”

So, too, today. The rhetorical specter of “socialism” — with its insidious hints of “death panels” and shadow governments — consistently casts a pall over attempts to reform health care, expand the social safety net and enact legal protections for gig workers (now a third of the nation’s workforce) who are disproportionately at risk in a pandemic economy.

The victory of President Trump’s identitarian populism is the clearest example that voters reject the concept of a shared common life. And it was bankrolled by such hedge fund donors as PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Thomas Peterffy, the founder and chief executive of Interactive Brokers Group, who recently told the New Yorker that his support of Trump was because “the U.S. will get to socialism” through “increasing government regulation.”

Yet our current suspicion of the institutions that might bind us together is unprecedented, even by American standards. A 2019 study by the Pew Research Center revealed that almost three-quarters of Americans younger than 30 say that people generally “just look out for themselves.” Young adults are significantly more likely than older Americans to express mistrust in the military, religious leaders or police. The institutions and organizations that have shaped our sense of the common good, and our role within it, seem to have conclusively failed. The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus threat could easily justify anyone’s lack of faith in the federal government.

At the same time, the Bill Gateses, Jack Dorseys and Peter Thiels of the world — seemingly “self-made” men, whose money and resources are increasingly forming the spine of the nation’s coronavirus response — represent a new and uniquely American vision of moral and political influence. The origin stories of these founder-heroes tend to emphasize their sui generis qualities that owe nothing to our shared institutions (governmental, ecclesiastical and educational). Many were college dropouts; Thiel, who holds two degrees from Stanford, created an eponymous fellowship that pays promising young entrepreneurs to leave college to code.

The techno-utopian libertarians of Silicon Valley and the hedge fund billionaires of Greenwich, Conn., share a conviction in the power of individual human freedom and the danger of any collective (or governmental) institution that might stymie unfettered human autonomy. Google’s Larry Page has gone on record envisioning a global free zone — one he likens to Nevada’s Burning Man festival — a “safe place” for technological experimentation not subject to any laws or safety regulations. Former Sears chief executive Eddie Lampert, now among the highest-paid hedge fund managers in the country, famously restructured the company in alignment with the economic principles of libertarian novelist Ayn Rand: The result was Sears filing for bankruptcy. The uber-rich, explicitly or implicitly, value the narrative of the uber-mensch. In this myth, wealth inequality is justified as the natural, material expression of the fundamental inequality of humanity.

These billionaires, whatever the source of their wealth, tend to frame their success as something they have earned on their own, whether through business savvy, technological creativity or old-fashioned American gumption. They (and we) decry American institutions — government, universities, health care, regulatory bodies — as fundamentally static and bureaucratic, holding back promising people from their destiny of self-making. As Thiel put it to economist Tyler Cowen in a 2015 podcast interview, denying that the United States is a democracy or a republic: “We are actually a state that’s dominated by these very unelected, technocratic agencies [that are] . . . deeply sclerotic, deeply nonfunctioning.” Contemporary billionaires see our civil institutions as mere bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, about 1 in 6 American children grows up in poverty. Our wealthiest school districts outspend their poorer counterparts by as much as 3 to 1. Adults living under the poverty line are five times as likely to say they are in “poor” or “fair” health as those making quadruple that much. Social services across the country are chronically underfunded. Our cultural obsession with freedom leaves behind our most vulnerable.

The coronavirus made clear that the rhetoric of human liberty is illusory, and with it the false narrative that individuals can make themselves in isolation. In a pandemic, no man is an island. Rather, we are, as Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima says in “The Brothers Karamazov,” all responsible to one another for everything. Our bodies, our labor, our social ties to one another are all interdependent. And we can address this pandemic only by recourse to a common life and common identity.

It is perhaps laudable that many of the victors of capitalism’s spoils want to contribute to the common project of fighting the pandemic. But we should not forget that so many of the factors that have rendered the coronavirus particularly deadly in the United States — income inequality, the lack of a social safety net, the precarious standing of newly-essential gig workers, the obsession with freedom from government tyranny and the lack of a coherent civic identity — are direct products of the way we valorize self-making.

The same faith in atomized consumerism that drives people to make billions of dollars in profit also positions them to donate some of that profit now. Our faith in capitalistic individualism has allowed corporations to both circumvent and co-opt the institutions of our shared civic life. It has weakened the foundations of our political coexistence. What capitalism’s victors are contributing to the coronavirus effort now should not be celebrated as altruistic charity but rather evidence of the broken system we have helped them build.

Aging Badly

The cover of the Styles section of The New York Times had an article in print called, Too Old? You Mean Fabulous.  Funny how they re-titled the same article for online called The Glamorous Grandmas of  Instagram.  Really?  If you read the article some of the women identify as a Grandmother but they don’t consider themselves traditionally Grandmotherly, which was the point of the article that I read.  Even the subtitle changed from Women Over 60 with sass and riveting style are Instagram stars.  Funny now it is apparently “subversive” to not ‘traditionally’ age.  And then promptly explains that our image and concept of aging is outdated and is changing as we change and transition into age.

“Age no longer dictates the way we live. Physical capacity, financial circumstances and mind-set arguably have far greater influence.”

A woman in her 50s, then, “might be a grandmother or a new mother,” the study goes on to say. “She might be an entrepreneur, a wild motorcyclist or a multi-marathon runner. Her lifestyle is not governed by her age but by her values and the things she cares about.” Some of these women and their counterparts abroad are still subscribing to the counterculture values and maverick stance they adopted in the 1960s and ’70s.

So why the title change?  Why classify women over 60 as Grandmothers or are choosing to be chic in their senior years, search out and employ methods to belong via social media and in turn are embracing age in ways that are less in the shadows and more in the forefront.

Also overlooked is their social media savvy. Eschewing stereotypes, 73 percent of participants “hate the way their generation is patronized when it comes to technology,” the report says. Six out of 10 say they find tech “fascinating,” according to the report, and many of those may actually be more competent using tech than their younger counterparts.

 Well Boomers are aging and they dying off and now the Millennials are the du jour cohort to embrace as they are the largest sector of population and will be entirely responsible for the economy in the decades to come thanks to declining birth rates.  So to that I say knock yourself up MeMe’s and make sure I get that Social Security check and Medicare I so need and want.  I cannot for the life of me understand why I can get Social Security at 62 but must wait three more years to get the Medicare?  If I am retired and not working I should be covered right?  Wrong and so I will work until I die just in the parameters of SS in order to retain the benefit.  I loathe working full time but I always did so now I have to go to part time and it cannot come soon enough – four years and counting! 

The other day I was at Dilliards talking to the salesperson as I was buying just ordinary underwear, neither granny nor sex kitten just underwear and in the exchange the clerk said:  “I see myself in the future talking to you.”  And I warned her that it is wonderfully freeing to be independent, secure, confident and without obligations, it also costs a great deal in ways that I had not anticipated 30 years ago.   If I had not married well and divorced even moreso I would be a clerk or a Teacher living hand to mouth but I am pretty sure the person I am, loud, abrasively honest and just me.  I may not have been nearly killed by a younger man six years ago, I may have married and still be so, I don’t think I would have ever capitulated on the bearing kids thing but hey you never know.. but no. To this day this is something I am relieved and grateful I did not.  But I wish I was better at intimacy and securing a long term relationship with a man in my peer group.  I told this same young woman that I see the point of men and in turn it is the point you make and in turn the one you want which you will have to sacrifice in order to have one in your life.  Men do not do well with women who have their own mind. 

And the same paper again last week had a massive article on how women give up their professional careers, wages and job growth when they are pregnant regardless of the employer, be it Walmart or Wall Street.  Once a woman chooses to have a baby she is labeled and marginalized by her employer and in turn her work life becomes one direction, down.  Everyone loves a mother, at home, not work.  Another story I heard on BBC this last week was about social personal boundaries regarding work and home life. This story in The Atlantic in 2016 confirms the same.  And regardless of income again women do the most amount of house keeping and child care even when in a two partner relationship. What was more shocking was that the more money the woman earned the more responsibility she takes on in the home as a way of over compensating to maintain order and the relationship. So there you go – be dumber and poorer and keep a good house.  Making America Great Again… via Betty Crocker, Good Housekeeping and Better Home and Gardens.  1950 is back people!

A few months ago I read an article in the same paper about adult orphans and the problems they face (as that would also be me) in living alone, long term planning for care and other social emotional issues faced by those aging and alone.  And that is another issue that I face myself, alone again naturally.   Women are not dynamos or thought of as interesting, chic or fashionable unless they live in New York City.  I live in Nashville and this is where aging is done in a church pew, over a stove making biscuits or egg dishes and in turn wearing utterly unattractive attire regardless of age, however, as this is surreal to see how they seem to think maxi dresses and chunky shoes are the new cover on WWD.  If you think wearing what you like and feel comfortable in includes athlesisure wear which I live in think again.  Not once but twice at Barre3 classes this last week I was “complimented” on my flare yoga pants. The two women said they loved them and wished they would come back in fashion so they can wear them. I said, “I don’t care about what is in or out in regards to exercise, as I approach 60 this is the last place I care about what I look like.  And by the way I bought these online about a month ago at Prana.”  One laughed the other goes I will go there right away.   For fuck’s sake this is a Barre3 class not Project Runway.  It’s like skinny jeans, if you are not skinny don’t wear them.  

I again as I said in the last blog post about Pride and why I chose not to participate was largely due to the lack of courtesy extended to me on the occasions that I went to the local bars of which I am truly a local and was ignored and duly bored.  One does not go to a bar to sit alone and drink and I can do that at home thankyouverymuch.   This community does not want strangers in their midst unless there is a check involved.   Hence the invites to Church, less about salvation but more about restitution.  In the Churches I visited that was clear and I did drop my $5 bucks in the kitty as I would in a Honky Tonk, the singers are always entertaining in that same way a Pastor and Choir are.  The songs and words however are forgotten once you vacate the premise.  The reality is that for this Christian place and the whole bullshit of Nashville nice and Southern Hospitality is just that bullshit.  This idea that a bunch of aging granny’s are hot, fun and chic are just that on paper.  In real life who are their friends, what is their life like and what do they do to feel wanted, important and active other than posting on social media.  Again that is just another way of aging badly. 

Buy Local?

Much is made of buy local and then much is made buy handmade and by women. In other words the idea behind it is buying stuff that your mother or grandmother used to make or you used to as a craft. The secondary notion is that from this an industry is built by helping those indigenous people in war torn countries have work.

Tom’s Shoes prides itself on donating shoes for children. Great philanthropy and do they have documentation to support this as they are a for profit company and I would like to know is this the best resource or need?

Then we have WalMart who fails to pay their employees sufficient wage or enough hours requiring them to go on public assistance, were devising a marketing strategy to add to labels a small, circular symbol indicating that the company behind the product is owned by women.

The idea is that by expressing values through buying decisions has become a regular practice for a certain breed of shopper (albeit one more likely to be found at Whole Foods than Walmart) to encourage positive messaging and positive consumerism. So they have customers go an modified treasure hunt to look for logos proclaiming a product is certified kosher or free from genetically modified organisms or made locally by fill in the whatever oppressed group of the month is.

Be it Free Trade, Organic or my favorite blood diamonds as that matters when coughing up cash for a rock, are all part of the need to both appeal and in turn make the customer feel better about buying the product.

But lets be honest we like our fashions like our foods cheap. The secondary bonus of this supposed but yet largely unverifiable charity is like a nice bath in warm water as it washes away guilt. Tom’s shoes are utter garbage, poorly made and disposable. I think that may be more the point as you need to be the one who will need more shoes.

Then we have the continued exploitation of children and women who are working in factories that are largely unregulated and unsafe with repeated accidents and fires proving that the pledges and demands of larger retailers and manufacturers are unheeded.

John Oliver once again hits a home run with the fashion industry and the cheapness of both words and quality. Remember we are poors and we are all disposable too.

And then I read this editorial in the New York Times. Etsy went public and is holding its own on the big marketplace of Wall Street.

I love Etsy but nothing I buy there is about saving anyone or the world. I buy what I like and what I can afford. I can peruse numerous vendors and in turn negotiate and exchange what I like. I love that many of the vendors can alter their product and customize for you bringing new meaning to haute couture and are in turn most quick to meet the order. I assume this is what Ebay was like in the early days as well.

But many Etsy vendors outsource too. They have to to enhance volume and turn profit. I don’t mind nor care. I don’t buy from any Chinese vendor that is what Target is for. I do look at where the seller lives and that can also determine if I can be sure the transaction will go as planned. (At times prices are altered due to changes in financial transactions/dollar exchanges and in turn shipping costs all which have to factored in) Hell I have had Canadian people never communicate with me and they are 3 hours to the North, but had none with a woman in Estonia. But Etsy is quick to resolve and I have (yet) felt frustrated or pissed about the products I buy.

I do not, however, think anything more than this is nice, I like it and I would wear it or put it in my house and enjoy it. I don’t have secondary thoughts as to what I am or am not doing to make this sale have an impact beyond the singular transaction it is.

It is nice to think we are doing some good but in reality we are all job creators every time we do buy or use a service. That is all the good we need.

Sorry, Etsy. That Handmade Scarf Won’t Save the World.

By EMILY MATCHAR
MAY 1, 2015

IN her memoir, “Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Ms. Lynn remembers the thrill of receiving her first “store-boughten” dress from a social services agent when she was around 7. It was blue with pink flowers and “dainty little pockets.”

“Mercy, how I loved it,” the singer recalls. Unfortunately, the family hog loved it, too. The dress was chewed to pieces and the young Ms. Lynn had to go back to wearing the dresses her mother sewed from old flour sacks.

Today, some 75 years later, you can buy a little blue dress with pink flowers on Walmart.com for $6.44. A handmade flour sack dress, on the other hand, will cost you $90 on Etsy.

Once a mark of poverty, handmade is hot these days. Nothing seems to shout “upper-middle-class values” like hand-carved wooden children’s toys, handmade lavender soap from the farmers’ market, artisan country bread and chunky hand-knit scarves. Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade goods, brought this homespun mania to national attention last month when it went public with a bang, ending its first day of trading at $30, up 87 percent from its I.P.O. of $16. It’s now joined by dozens of other handmade-goods sites, and hundreds of artisan markets across America.

Our hunger for handmade has gone beyond aesthetics, uniqueness and quality. In progressive circles, buying handmade has come to connote moral virtue, signifying an interest in sustainability and a commitment to social justice. By making your own cleaning supplies, you’re eschewing environment-poisoning chemicals. By buying a handmade sweater, you’re fighting sweatshop labor. By chatting with the artisan who makes your soap, you’re striking a blow against our alienated “Bowling Alone” culture.

While buying homemade gifts is a lovely thing to do, thinking of it as a social good is problematic.
Like locavorism and “eco consumerism,” it’s part of a troubling trend for neoliberal “all change begins with your personal choices” ideology. This ideology is attractive: Buy something nice, do something good. But it doesn’t work, at least not very well.

When it comes to complex issues, “vote with your wallet” campaigns have never been particularly effective in driving consumer change. In the 1970s, musical “look for the union label” TV ads were so ubiquitous they earned a parody on “Saturday Night Live.” But they didn’t halt the decline of unions. Around the same time, cars sported “Buy American: The Job You Save May Be Your Own” bumper stickers. Did it stop people from buying Toyotas? Hardly.

A vast majority of people will continue to buy what they buy for one reason: It’s a good value. Very few of us will order a $50 handmade scarf on Etsy when one is available for $5 at Target. We can’t expect most consumers to avoid items made in sweatshops or by otherwise exploited workers. We need regulations for that. When “buy handmade” is couched as a solution to exploitative labor conditions, it’s easy to forget structural change-making.

As curmudgeonly as this sounds, the sweet idea of “community building” through personal connection with artisans is not as simple as it seems, either. A few years ago, I attended a conference for Etsy entrepreneurs, where I sat in on a seminar about “narrative building.” It was critical, the seminar leader explained, to give your customers something personal: pictures of your kids, a story about a project that failed. If they found you likable, they’d be more eager to buy.

This is what you might call “affiliative consumerism” — people buying stuff from people they know and find appealing. People who are like them. On the face of it, this is a good thing: Isn’t that what community is about? Yet it means that money stays in a circle of like-minded individuals.

In her 2012 book “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion,” the journalist Elizabeth Cline visits Alta Gracia, a unionized garment factory in the Dominican Republic. The workers are paid a living wage, roughly three and a half times the Dominican Republic’s minimum wage. Is it better for my dollar to go to the likable, just-like-me Brooklyn mom selling handmade headbands on Etsy or to a company that uses garment factories like Alta Gracia?

Much is also made about the eco-friendliness of handmade.

“Buying handmade (especially really locally) can greatly reduce your carbon footprint on the world,” reads a post on the popular website Handmadeology.

But few economists give much credence to the idea that buying local necessarily saves energy. Most believe that the economies of scale inherent in mass production outweigh the benefits of nearness. These same economies of scale most likely make a toothbrush factory less wasteful, in terms of materials, than 100 individual toothbrush makers each handcrafting 10 toothbrushes a day. An efficient toothbrush factory bound by strong environmental regulations would benefit everyone the most.

A potentially positive effect of the handmade movement has been the creation of a new income stream for parents (mostly mothers) and others who need flexible work. Since its inception, Etsy has served as a sort of modern version of what selling Mary Kay and Tupperware used to be. It offers the possibility of self-directed part-time work that can be done while attending to child care responsibilities, a rarity in America. But the dream has only ever materialized for a few, and even those who become successful often burn out trying to stitch iPod cases for 16 hours a day. Again, what’s truly needed is systemic change: mandatory paid parental leave and subsidized day care.

There are plenty of good reasons to buy handmade. You’re probably not going to find a squid-shaped dining chair or a crocheted sloth at a big box store, for one. It’s important to support artisans who retain knowledge of traditional art forms. Many handmade items are also higher quality than their mass-produced counterparts. But will buying handmade change the economy or save the world? Not likely.

American Made

As a proponent of American manufacturing I loved today’s article in the Style section of the NYT.  This is about an American fashion manufacturer with a long history and even better story.

I am not going to add my thoughts only to say as a dedicated follower of fashion it is nice to see that old dogs learn new tricks.  Keep on truckin.

A Tennessee Clothing Factory Keeps Up the Old Ways

Brian Wagner for The New York Times

At L. C. King Manufacturing, the quality comes not just from design, but from the manufacturer. More Photos »

By CATHY HORYN
Published: August 14, 2013

Not long ago, I got an e-mail from a man thanking me for mentioning his label, Pointer Brand, in an article in 2006. This was no thank-you note. I read on: “With a lot of hard work and persistence, we recently celebrated 100 years of manufacturing in Bristol Tennessee.” It was signed: “Jack King, fourth generation, L. C. King Manufacturing Company.”

Before I took the bait and called him, I looked up the article. Pointer makes work clothes that are part of the rural South: a light canvas jacket worn into the field in the morning and removed as the sun rises, dungarees and overalls of various types depending on well-marked preferences: low-back in Kentucky, high-back in Georgia. But these details I learned later. My article merely stated that the designer Junya Watanabe had modified some Pointer jackets for his men’s line. These changes, funnily, were not unlike the careful and ingenious improvements that farmers used to make on their old clothes, except the Watanabe deluxe versions started at $800.

The people at the Tennessee factory were oblivious of all this. Oh, they knew a Japanese firm had requested some items, but they never took the trouble to find out more. Not indifferent but perhaps numb is a better description of Jack King’s response, because indeed he did crave a connection to high fashion.

It was hard not to be impressed by the position he was in: he owned a factory in the South that hadn’t been modernized, which in the eyes of sophisticates made it a diamond in the rough, and yet, to him, in 2006, it often felt like a lump of iron strapped to his back. As I soon discovered, he came to the factory reluctantly, in 1999, when his father, Riley, became ill. Jack was in his dream job in Atlanta, at a food broker, he said, “studying the French fry market for the Pacific Rim.”

While looking up the article, I decided to punch “L. C. King” into the newspaper’s archive. Up came dozens of citations for not only L. C. King but also the H. P. King department store and E. W. King, a dry goods wholesaler; all were in Bristol. They appeared in a column, Arrival of Buyers, that ran from the preflapper era to the dawn of designer ready-to-wear, in 1970. If you sold or made goods in the United States and you wanted it known that your buyer was in town, you telephoned a number to register. In 1930, you dialed LACkawanna 1000.

The lists astonished me. From Hecht’s Reliable stores in Baltimore, to Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh, to Laskin & Bro. in El Paso, they were a virtual directory of American retailing in an age before Walmart. I saw the O’Neil Co. of Akron. My mom bought her stockings — Hanes South Pacific, three pairs to a box; did a little wiggle walk when you lifted them out of the tissue — at the Coshocton, Ohio, branch.

Why I should be amazed at lists of defunct companies, when many closed for well-known reasons, I can’t say. Certainly the global fashion industry doesn’t need our dirty old factories. It has gotten along without them for 30 years, after all.

On the other hand, a drive to Tennessee might be interesting, I thought. It was May. In the back of my mind was the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh that killed 1,129 people, but my last thought, and still my last thought, was that a little factory in the Appalachians, near the Virginia line, was going to make a difference. It was David and Goliath; a campfire compared to the industrial Hades of south China.

And you can’t fault the Chinese for taking the lead in apparel and textile production in the ’80s, for modernizing, when Western nations, including ours, wanted to be in new technology industries, though for many people that wound up meaning low-wage fast-food jobs instead of work in a clothing factory at twice the pay.

No, I was simply looking for something that felt feasible. A road trip, a different conversation from the ones I was having. I called Jack King, and a week later was 650 miles down I-81.

On the phone, I found out a little more about the company. L. C. King is the oldest cut-and-sew factory in the United States still owned by its founding family. In addition to Pointer, which Mr. King’s great-grandfather, Landon Clayton King, a sportsman, created in 1913, the factory produces work and outdoor garments for other companies. At one time these included Sears, Bass Pro Shops and 700 Walmarts in the Southeast, he said, but Nafta, in the mid-’90s, took out that business — first a chunk, then all of it.

Mr. King spoke matter-of-factly, and was very polite. As he said, “I’m not here to dog anybody.” Before Nafta, though, the factory employed 130 people, and now it’s 28. Having Mr. Watanabe’s endorsement made a big difference in terms of confidence, he said. “It really helped us know that we can sew stuff that people want as fashion.”

In the last two years a number of new designers, a number of designers interested in American-made, have used the factory. “We’ve got one label from Knoxville — Marc Nelson — his stuff is absolutely gorgeous,” Mr. King said.

He then said he planned to travel to London soon to meet with an individual who had been involved with Nudie jeans, as he believed L. C. King could be developed as a brand. And Mr. Watanabe has been back in touch.

“We’re doing some jeans for him right now,” Mr. King said. “His office called and asked, ‘Can you do 200 pairs?’ ” That number falls short of minimums in Los Angeles jeans factories. “My attitude is, heck, I’ll do anything.”

Before we hung up, he said: “We start at 5:30 a.m. Yes, ma’am, summer hours. There’s no air-conditioning.”

I ARRIVED just after 8. The factory sits a block from Bristol’s main drag, trim and plain, its red brick and slanted dusty windows newly washed with sunlight. In spite of the hour, the factory didn’t seem busy. I waited on the sidewalk, thinking someone might see me, and then I entered and climbed the stairs to the factory floor.

Straight ahead was a vast room with a cutting table, the length of a bowling alley, and at the end was a man — Will Holt, he is — pushing an electric knife through a stack of denim. The pine floor was a dark patina. There was hardly a noise except the purr of sewing machines or the slap of the pocket machine and a radio somewhere. The place was archaic, its rhythms from another time. It was beautiful.

Eventually I found Mr. King in the gym he had installed in a space once filled, pre-Nafta, with Bass Pro Shop gear. Several middle-aged employees were doing pull-ups with a trainer named Chad. “I’m an athlete, a competitive swimmer,” Mr. King said. “I didn’t want the employees to think a workout would be on their time. It’s an option.”

A medium-built man, 50, in jeans and a brown plaid shirt, with a tense air and a booming laugh, Mr. King introduced me to Ben Collins, hired about a year ago to handle social media and other types of communication. Then we went on a tour of the factory, starting in the stockroom, where wooden crates from the ’30s serve as shelves for chore jackets and brand-new blue overalls.

Over the next two days, and later on the phone, it was Mr. Collins who helped unravel the enigma of L. C. King — and of Jack King, as well. Perhaps it is because he is a sensitive observer, and an outsider, who recognizes what a valuable asset the factory is in Mr. King’s world — maybe more than Mr. King does.

The other person who helped was Marinda Holt, who has worked at L. C. King for 26 years. Skilled at almost any job in the factory, with abundant hair and a sassy charm, she works most closely with the outside designers who come in. She’s a remarkable woman.

Mr. Collins had owned an ad agency in town, and after selling it, considered joining a major firm. He said: “The agencies I was encountering just had no taste. It’s like your end game is Chick-fil-A. I think coming to work here was a fantasy I was living. I walked by it all the time. My wife, Cam, built the back end of the Web site. I thought: ‘Why not? This is going to be an unpredictable and rewarding experience.’ I’m so happy I’ve done it.”

Early on, he saw that Pointer was getting lots of traffic from Reddit, thanks to Japanese hipsters and West Coast workwear fans, and the company was ignoring it. Clearly Mr. Collins regards L .C. King as this delicate organism. “As someone who was burned out on fake marketing, I got here and I suddenly felt, ‘Don’t touch anything,’ ” he said, with a laugh. For instance, he found out that the founder was a Harley fan who owned custom guns and shoes.

“L. C. didn’t wear overalls,” he said. “I feel he’s one of the keys.”

Jack King’s actions are harder to figure. He surprised me when, as we were coming into the factory’s original, sun-faded office, he said: “I can’t get Cone Denim to return my phone calls. I’ve called their office, no lie, five times in the past year.” Cone, in nearby Greensboro, N.C., is a renowned supplier of narrow selvage denim, made on ’40s-era looms. It’s hard to harbor serious fashion ambitions without it. Mr. King shrugged. “But that’s O.K. People don’t really know L. C. King Manufacturing exists. I am the secret of the South. I really am.”

Yet, between 2004 and 2011, he did make connections with fashion folks in New York, including Lee Norwood, a senior executive at Ralph Lauren, who helped Mr. King develop a pattern for a $60 five-pocket jeans style, today one of L. C. King’s best sellers.

“He’s done a good job with very little help,” Mr. Norwood said. “But he needs someone he can trust on the creative side. There’s so much to be uncovered there, but it has to be done with vision. I told him, ‘You’ve got what every fashion brand doesn’t have: purity.’ ”

In fact, initially, part of the problem was that Mr. King really didn’t know what a factory did. As a boy, he wasn’t allowed on the sewing floor. Also, he said, “My dad and I had this really torrid relationship.” He didn’t get full control of the factory until 2009.

Ms. Holt recalled: “When Jack first got here, I couldn’t stand him, to be honest with you. He thought it had to be his way or no way. ‘We’re going into fashion.’ But we weren’t into fashion then. We were in overalls and dungarees. I remember him and Riley getting into it so many times. He was so cocky. In his $200 pair of jeans, and here we are in our Walmart specials.” She laughed. “But he’s changed that, too — a whole lot. I love him like family now.”

Mr. King said that and similar comments I heard were accurate. “I basically swallowed my pride and sucked it up and said, ‘Well, I’m going to be like this now instead of who I used to be.’ ”

At the end of my first day in Bristol, Ms. Holt showed me some designers’ jeans made in the factory — by Lumina, a casual men’s line in Raleigh. N.C.; the beautiful Marc Nelson hand-distressed jeans; and a cool pair of Ruell and Ray by Ashley James, who left the factory after she and Mr. King tangled. Still, Ms. James said: “There’s a gold mine — a gold mine. The skill set is there.”

It is amazing to think that in eastern Tennessee there is a workwear factory that functions as an atelier where designers are free to work. Mr. King invites them in. It is not the refined quality of an Los Angeles factory or of, say, 3×1, Scott Morrison’s SoHo facility. It is a different quality. After trying to make his Marc Nelson jeans in Los Angeles, Marcus Hall, a charismatic guy who used to be a contractor, came to L. C. King.

“Let me say this: in Los Angeles, it was very duplicated,” he said. “I feel like, here in Bristol, it’s done by hand, like the human touch is clear.” Mr. Hall, who has produced 3,000 pairs of jeans in different styles at the factory, added, “By me coming here, it’s helped them to learn and take them out of their box.”

IF YOU WANT to know what makes fashion truly different (and maybe, as well, our stores and our communities), the answer is not a designer or a marketer. It is a manufacturer.

“Factories don’t just exist as factories,” Robert Kidder, the owner of New England Shirt Company, in Fall River, Mass., said one afternoon. “They have to have a purpose and fulfill something special. American product has to be different.”

In four years, Mr. Kidder, a former men’s wear executive, has built a thriving business making private-label shirts for brands like Polo but also the nation’s growing number of men’s shops. No minimums. He recently cut an elbow-patched oxford shirt for a shop in Westerly, R.I., called Huxter. The owner, who got the idea on a whim, started the summer with 45 of the $132 shirts. So far, he’s sold 300.

“If you approach American-made with that attitude,” Mr. Kidder said, “it allows you to see how you can rebuild an industry in pieces.”

When I caught up with Mr. King after his London trip, he said the plan is now to bring the L. C. King brand more into the world. He said he had spoken to a group of investors about possibly adding $500,000 in new machines. And he’s even reached Cone. Of course there are enormous challenges. One, as Tracy Doyle, the chief branding officer at Box Studios in New York, notes, is how to put a new spin on the craft story now that luxury brands have made it old hat.

But at least Mr. King is not such a secret anymore. The other day a major Nashville star contacted him about making some clothes.

“His laugh echoed through the whole factory,” Ben Collins said. “He just has pride in his people and the factory. He wants this company and this town to make out O.K.”

Designing for Dummies

I think we overlook the power of design and its impact and need on on our Community, both its extrinsic and intrinsic qualities.

As I spend the last few weeks looking at the designs of fashion, from New York to Paris to Milan, the idea of how clothing is an art and a powerful aesthetic of its own expression for both creator and wearer.  It truly does take two to make that one work.   Some things look good on the hanger but not the body and sometimes its how its worn that makes the garment alive.

I love clothes, nothing says being an advocate of sustainability means giving up your passions and I love clothing. Its an expression, its a costume, it evokes a mood, a presence, a sense of purpose, whimsy or just glamour.  Yes its in the eye of the beholder and at times it seems superficial and artificial but done with care and honesty to one’s self and one’s pocketbook, having a personal signature is more than something on a page on which you sign.

Design is in our buildings, inside and outside.  Sometimes looking out from within makes one reflect more on what surrounds us than what envelopes us.  The interior is as essential as the exterior in those buildings that you place a premium – both work and home.  There is no way one’s mood, one’s thoughts, one’s efforts are not influenced by what surrounds us.  You cannot be unaffected by that which you spend the most time.

I walk through neighborhoods much the same way I walk through Museums. I stop to look at house, a garden or simply a business to see if it explains something, tells a story or simply is pleasing to the eye.  Beauty again in the eye of the beholder and like our taste in clothing its personal and it is entirely our own.

I read this article a couple of weeks back on design and its called “Why We Love Beautiful Things.”  We all define beauty as we do sustainability.  Our meanings our, experiences, our culture, our influences and other extrinsic factors have all had some element in what and how we come to recognize beauty.

Stop and smell the roses and you may find that there is no scent. Are they less beautiful? Design may have something to do with that.

Why We Love Beautiful Things

By: LANCE HOSEY

Published: February 15, 2013

GREAT design, the management expert Gary Hamel once said, is like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography — you know it when you see it. You want it, too: brain scan studies reveal that the sight of an attractive product can trigger the part of the motor cerebellum that governs hand movement. Instinctively, we reach out for attractive things; beauty literally moves us.

Yet, while we are drawn to good design, as Mr. Hamel points out, we’re not quite sure why.

This is starting to change. A revolution in the science of design is already under way, and most people, including designers, aren’t even aware of it.

Take color. Last year, German researchers found that just glancing at shades of green can boost creativity and motivation. It’s not hard to guess why: we associate verdant colors with food-bearing vegetation — hues that promise nourishment.

This could partly explain why window views of landscapes, research shows, can speed patient recovery in hospitals, aid learning in classrooms and spur productivity in the workplace. In studies of call centers, for example, workers who could see the outdoors completed tasks 6 to 7 percent more efficiently than those who couldn’t, generating an annual savings of nearly $3,000 per employee.

In some cases the same effect can happen with a photographic or even painted mural, whether or not it looks like an actual view of the outdoors. Corporations invest heavily to understand what incentivizes employees, and it turns out that a little color and a mural could do the trick.

Simple geometry is leading to similar revelations. For more than 2,000 years, philosophers, mathematicians and artists have marveled at the unique properties of the “golden rectangle”: subtract a square from a golden rectangle, and what remains is another golden rectangle, and so on and so on — an infinite spiral. These so-called magical proportions (about 5 by 8) are common in the shapes of books, television sets and credit cards, and they provide the underlying structure for some of the most beloved designs in history: the facades of the Parthenon and Notre Dame, the face of the “Mona Lisa,” the Stradivarius violin and the original iPod.

Experiments going back to the 19th century repeatedly show that people invariably prefer images in these proportions, but no one has known why.

Then, in 2009, a Duke University professor demonstrated that our eyes can scan an image fastest when its shape is a golden rectangle. For instance, it’s the ideal layout of a paragraph of text, the one most conducive to reading and retention. This simple shape speeds up our ability to perceive the world, and without realizing it, we employ it wherever we can.

Certain patterns also have universal appeal. Natural fractals — irregular, self-similar geometry — occur virtually everywhere in nature: in coastlines and riverways, in snowflakes and leaf veins, even in our own lungs. In recent years, physicists have found that people invariably prefer a certain mathematical density of fractals — not too thick, not too sparse. The theory is that this particular pattern echoes the shapes of trees, specifically the acacia, on the African savanna, the place stored in our genetic memory from the cradle of the human race. To paraphrase one biologist, beauty is in the genes of the beholder — home is where the genome is.

LIFE magazine named Jackson Pollock “the greatest living painter in the United States” in 1949, when he was creating canvases now known to conform to the optimal fractal density (about 1.3 on a scale of 1 to 2 from void to solid). Could Pollock’s late paintings result from his lifelong effort to excavate an image buried in all of our brains?

We respond so dramatically to this pattern that it can reduce stress levels by as much as 60 percent — just by being in our field of vision. One researcher has calculated that since Americans spend $300 billion a year dealing with stress-related illness, the economic benefits of these shapes, widely applied, could be in the billions.

It should come as no surprise that good design, often in very subtle ways, can have such dramatic effects. After all, bad design works the other way: poorly designed computers can injure your wrists, awkward chairs can strain your back and over-bright lighting and computer screens can fatigue your eyes.

We think of great design as art, not science, a mysterious gift from the gods, not something that results just from diligent and informed study. But if every designer understood more about the mathematics of attraction, the mechanics of affection, all design — from houses to cellphones to offices and cars — could both look good and be good for you.

Wrap It Up

I have written quite a bit about the use of Tyvek House Wrap in fashion and design. There was the innovative coats and the curtains made of this amazingly waterproof and durable building material.

As shown in the pallet entry, limits are imagination and some skill set.

Here are some great finds I share that demonstrate Tyvek’s universal appeal and use.

A Coat with a new designer label:

A backpack that says chic without the gortex:

A lamp that is more than an eggshell:

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If only the Mail Carrier had one.

A shower curtain that defines simplicity with practicality.

Is this Prada?

A great chair/futon cover:

I hope Project Runway in the next season takes on building materials to test the talents, imagination and creativity of its designers. I cannot wait to hear Tim Gunn go “Make it work”.

Shop Til You Drop

Well we have dropped. The U.S. Economy has long been sustained by a shopping zeal that few other countries emulate. And now the bill has come due. From our inflated Education costs, Healthcare to Housing we have an overwhelming desire to buy what we think we need and even what we don’t because retail therapy is easier, still cheaper and faster than actually finding and solving what ails us. This also is a lot to due with denial about the truth about our own economic situations. I had to laugh when reading transcripts of Anne Romney’s speech at the RNC saying “women know what Doctor to call in the middle of the night” Clearly I have to get that Doctor’s number. I wonder if it will put me in financial arrears like the rest of Medicine seems to do for the well the rest of us. And do Doctor’s still make house calls?

Of course she was wearing a $2,000 dollar Designer dress while espousing the role of a hard working wife of a hard working man. Again that is some work. And yet much is made of Michelle Obama’s wardrobe. She is the First Lady and I do think that job is hard as to the man she is married to. I feel that way regardless of party or politics. Certain jobs require certain standards and that includes clothing. But we have clearly confused what that means to the “everyman” who can’t afford a $2,000 dress or its copy at Target for $20.

The same could be said for electronics/technology. The lines outside of an Apple store on release day for the latest greatest I-fill-in-the-blank are often covered on the evening news yet rarely followed by stories on how said products are made.

I found this article in today’s New York Times about fashion and the price paid for goods less about quality and more about consumption. Target I believe truly initialized this fad of “designer” duds at Target prices. But what is often neglected is that the only thing designer about them is the label. Unlike the namesake’s department store quality merchandise, these items are made cheaply, poorly and with a short lifespan. The surplus of discarded clothes is so severe that many countries can no longer process the waste. This is not sustainable in any sense of the word.

Fashion’s Cost, Hidden and Not So
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
Published: August 29, 2012

“Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion.” By Elizabeth L. Cline. 256 pages. Portfolio. $25.95.

“You Are What You Wear: What Your Clothes Reveal About You.” By Dr. Jennifer Baumgartner. 272 pages. Da Capo Lifelong Books. $16.

“How to Look Expensive: A Beauty Editor’s Secrets to Getting Gorgeous Without Breaking the Bank.” By Andrea Pomerantz Lustig. 224 pages. Gotham Books. $22.50.

YOU may have seen the famous 1970s Coca-Cola ad in which smiling young people of many nations gathered to sing about “perfect harmony.” But have you ever seen the famous 1970s ad for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, in which American men and women of many races sang in unison, asking fellow citizens to “look for the Union label” when they bought their clothes?

That union label, they tunefully explained, meant, “We’re able to make it in the U.S.A.” That’s not a refrain you will hear anymore, nor will you find the union’s label in H&M, Walmart, Uniqlo or any of the chains where Americans buy clothing at rock-bottom prices these days.

Instead, you’ll find labels that say “Made in Bangladesh” or “Made in China” on garments that can be bought for the price of a Coke and a sandwich, and whose manufacture does not guarantee a worker a living wage “in the U.S.A.,” or anywhere else.

In “Overdressed,” her book on the trillion-dollar global clothing industry, Elizabeth L. Cline explains that “in the late 1970s, three-fourths of our clothes were still made in the United States.” Today, that number has dropped to 2 percent. As consumers have become “focused on quantity over quality and trends over innovative design,” she writes, Americans have come to see clothing as a “discretionary” purchase, a trend assisted by round-the-clock online bargain-hunting.

Where’s the harm in the 24/7 new-clothes-buying cycle? Ms. Cline argues that besides perpetuating labor woes, the disposable clothing “free-for-all” has brought us “the empty uniformity of cheapness.”

To demonstrate how the current fashion industry operates, Ms. Cline sent e-mails overseas, asking companies how much they would charge to mass-produce a handful of garments she described (pulled from her own hangers in Brooklyn). In Hong Kong, Dhaka and Santo Domingo, she met with garment workers, observing at first hand the hardships they put up with to secure United States contracts. Later, taking a skirt to New York City’s struggling garment district, she learned that it would cost six times as much to make here, and would retail for twice the price a bargain-hunter would tolerate. When only a sliver of the population knows the difference between badly made and well-made clothing, and when those who splash out on designer dresses often care more about brands than seams, she writes, “It’s not that we can’t pay more money for fashion; we just don’t see any reason to.”

JENNIFER BAUMGARTNER, a psychologist and wardrobe consultant based in Potomac, Md., blames the nationwide shopping spree for an epidemic of wardrobe maladies. In her insightful book “You Are What You Wear,” she analyzes nine “symptomatic” closets she’s encountered in her work.

She describes the poignant “Time Travel” closet of the mom in her mid-40s, whose hangers and drawers overflow with rhinestone-studded candy-colored terry jumpsuits, plastic flip-flops and neon jelly bracelets, because she shops like her teenage daughter. (There’s a reason it’s called “Forever 21,” not “Forever 47.”)

She exposes the “Cover’s Blown” closet of a woman who has assembled an overly revealing wardrobe, believing her eye-catching outfits will win her admiration at the office and at nightclubs. Instead, her outfits get her ogled … and shunned. Dr. Baumgartner gives her a nudge toward wardrobe choices that will garner the right kind of attention.

The most common closet crime is probably the “Shop Til You Drop” compulsion, in which coupon-crazed shoppers buy — or charge — more clothing than they can wear or afford, lured by deals that seem too good to pass up. Dr. Baumgartner diagnoses one such fashion felon with “sale insanity.”

THAT said, is it so crazy to succumb to the temptation to buy faddish clothing for low prices, at a cultural moment when even celebrities brag of mixing Target with Tory Burch? The beauty editor Andrea Pomerantz Lustig believes that the best way to look like a million bucks when your outfit costs less than your lunch is to take pains with your hair, makeup and skin care, using tips she has compiled over a lifetime.

In her book “How to Look Expensive” (by which she means “classy,” that embarrassingly earnest word describing the universally sought-after aura), she reveals the power tools in her arsenal, and provides affordable and D.I.Y. alternatives for her cosmetic weaponry.

Dividing the effect women generally seek into four categories (the classic Park Avenue look, Bohemian glamour, European sophistication and Hollywood hipness), she provides strategies and product recommendations for achieving the skin, hair, brow, teeth and nails that each look requires.

She advocates a “mix it up” approach. You don’t have to stick to Chanel and Fekkai; L’Oréal and John Frieda can do the trick. “Like fashion, where you may shop at a discount store,” Ms. Lustig writes, “you can go high-end, low-end and everywhere in between with your skin-care products — and wear them all at the same time.”

In the absence of firm fashion rules, each woman must police her own beauty borders.

Vive Le France

In an attempt to expand my reach and expose more of my interests I wanted to post about fashion and design, a real love of mine in many ways.

I do think its perfectly green to look great and feel great as that extends that attitude towards all things that surround you. Having a great environment is both a big and small picture. Upon my trolling today I found a French company that espouses the great advocacy of the sustainable movement while also expressing that great sense of French style and elegance.

Meet ALTERMUNDI: network of shops of fair trade and responsible. A wide range of products and ethnic design in our rays deco, furniture, fashion and accessories, well-being and children. From furniture to clothing they have the most amazing products that evoke a Sens de la beauté et de l’objectif.

Here is one example

This piece of furniture is manufactured according to the rules of fair trade. Convenient frake wood and wrought iron. Lukare is the recent meeting of a dozen of craftsmen from Lukare the foundation. These craftsmen work primarily the wrought iron, wood frake and the nylon braid. The originality of their work lies in the complete freedom that their is left to the level of creation.

Or this great dress Created in 1988 by the inveterate traveler Joe Komodo, the brand advocates the style in the respect of the environment with the use of materials such as organic cotton, hemp, bamboo and soy. The collections are manufactured in Nepal, India or to Bali in compliance with the rules of the fair trade.

Or these beautiful almost whimsical bags by Life Before Silk. Made with wild silk, cotton, velvet and muslin they are are combined to marvel for a surprising result of color and originality.

There are local sites that carry these gorgeous products but its worth the effort and the use of a translator to see all what they have to offer. Design is essential in making eco friendly products interesting and successful and without that element I believe all that green is often lost in translation.

Dedicated Follower of Fashion

A Tyvek Rain Coat.

I have be musing of late to start a Tumblr blog about my other passions – food and fashion and art. But I thought today I would indulge and include some posts about fashion design using materials most often found in build design

When they merge with building materials there is a perfect organic symmetry that cannot be committed to a blog about sustainability and green build – or can they?

I found today wk-shp.com a clothing line dedicated to materials and design most often found in Architecture and Building. Airi Isoda earned a an architecture degree and has worked for a number of prominent firms in Los Angeles. Her inspirations are art, the built environment and other modern influences. At her site she says she strives to find the connection between architecture and fashion, reflecting on the urban landscapes where the two meet

As you peruse the site you see a unique and modern collection of very wearable clothes incorporating concrete, wood, metal latex paint and my favorite, Tvyek (house wrap).

Note the beautiful necklace made of concrete forms. Seemingly light but also substantial.

Or this silk charmuese blouse finished with latex paint and a delicate wood veneer collar.

wk-shp goes beyond just using building materials to make clothing they make clothing as a art form. The magnificent forms and use of very non-traditional materials might seem to some a challenge found on Project Runway but from such challenge comes great inspiration. As a long time follower of the show I may find many things head scratching but then again if you ever watch a Paris couture show you have seen amazing clothing made from garbage bags to brown paper ones. Design is inspirational and its not proprietary to one medium.

DRIFT Eyewear has also come up with a line of eyeglasses made of wood and other sustainable materials and a strong corporate philosophy that advocates strong craftsmanship and design. DRIFT is a company founded on a desire to push the eyewear industry to a new level through technological innovation and ecological consciousness.

Design is about just that design be it in buildings or fashion or in art. It is about thinking outside the box and pushing boundries while establishing new frontiers in eco friendly sustainable concepts. Its not all hemp wear.